'Shakedown' Is Two Scenes Above Zero

Only two scenes in Shakedown are actually worth watching. One shows a roller-coaster car jumping its tracks and flying through the air.

In the other, a man leaps from a moving Porsche to the wheels of a jet that is taking off, throws a grenade into the jet, and falls into the sea just in time to escape the explosion.

The rest of the movie is composed of unimaginative action scenes, hokey dialogue and hard-to-follow plot twists.

Actually, I'm not sure if I found the plot confusing because it is needlessly complex or because I didn't really care what was happening. Either way, this isn't good.

Set in New York, the story concerns a legal-aid attorney named Roland Dalton (Peter Weller) who is -- all together, now -- just about to leave his job. Roland's final assignment is to defend a drug dealer who has killed a cop. The dealer claims that the cop was corrupt and that the killing was in self-defense. Helping Roland to prove this is a maverick undercover cop called Richie Marks (Sam Elliott).

According to the film's press information, Shakedown is based ''on a true story.'' But this is a little like saying that Star Wars was based on the Apollo space program.

Just what part of Shakedown is true? The part where a taxi driver, for no good reason, wrecks his cab so that Roland can get to court? The part where Roland scales the wall of the police station and breaks into the evidence room? Or maybe the roller coaster scene, or the scene with the exploding jet? I have no inside information about the real-life events that inspired this movie, but if any of these things took place I suspect they did not happen quite as they do in Shakedown. And a movie that contains a line like ''I'm outta here, babe, 'cause it's kickin' the life outta me'' is not, to say the least, particularly sensitive to nuance.

Literal truth -- or even realism -- isn't even the main issue with Shakedown. Exploitation is. It's possible to look at a seamy, violent environment in a tough-minded way without being gratuitously crude in your approach. That, for example, is how the recent Colors handles its harsh material.

But in Shakedown, the rule appears to have been: If it's hype-able, hype away. If I said that the film includes an electrocution in a house of prostitution would you believe me? (It does.) In this sort of picture, all you can do is hope that the action sequences are carried off with some sort of flair, which, as I've said, they are exactly twice.

As Roland, Peter Weller (RoboCop), tries to inject a sympathetic lightness into his character, but the task is hopeless. (What I remember best about Roland's personality is his flamboyant ties.) And Sam Elliott (Mask), as Richie, has even less to work with. (That is, he doesn't wear ties.)

The cast also includes Richard Brooks as the accused drug dealer, Antonio Fargas as a narcotics kingpin and Blanche Baker as Roland's hapless fiancee. Patricia Charbonneau plays a prosecuting attorney who opposes Roland in the courtroom though she -- once again, class -- makes love to him in the bedroom. Shakedown was written and directed by James Glickenhaus (The Exterminator), who probably had something along the lines of Stakeout or Lethal Weapon in mind. When the new film shows up on cable (which ought to be darn soon), I hope the cable company will include the times of the roller- coaster- and exploding-jet scenes in their listings.